File 4 - Marble

Amos, Night the same day.

Sam was lying in bed, question marks filling his head. His reason has been shaken heavily the last four days. It was on the verge of collapse:

He was conscious of the time passing unlike in a dream.

Four days’ time! Four days’ time including sleep and dreams...during his sleep?! Was it possible to have a dream in a dream? It never happened to him at least.

“What is it with this situation..”

During the last four days, countless people came to visit Sam. The men were wearing old looking robes, some of them armors, but most were wearing farmer’s attires.

The women, wore everything from fancy looking to dirty and used farmer’s clothes. It looked old fashioned, like country people.

"What kind of people would kidnap me, use some weird method to nurse me, and come visite me as if I was an animal in a zoo?"

No interrogations, no contacts, only being stared at by all type of gazes. Some where disturbed, other disgusted. Some showed surprised expression when Sam looked at them. Immediatly hiding from his sight while pointing at Sam in a disgusted manner.

He lived it as an humiliation. Sam was unable to move or shout to chase them away.

"Is it torture? what a nightmare!" still, he did not want to admit that is was reality.

Because if this not a dream, then...

The last four days, Sam’s condition improved a lot; Sam was finally able to move his arms and legs a little, not with enough strength to stand up, but enough to reassure Sam that he was not paralyzed.

The thing that perturbed Sam greatly was the state of his body.

His body looked weird, the hand he painfully brought before his eye was not his own.

It was a hand the size of a child’s. The skin looked pale, dry and hint of cracks appeared on the back of it.

His body was not his own, if this was reality… Sam’s reason still was not ready to accept this fact.

In fact, it was just the opposite. It just contributed to reinforce his thoughts on being in a dream.

He was still unable to mutter an intelligible sound, but his throat condition improved. He felt that just a little more time was needed. He did not really trusted a feeling born within a dream, but considering his situation, it was the best he could do to remain somewhat in control.

He relaxed and decided to get a good night sleep in this dream.

-----

In the sky above Amos, a ripple appeared and a black sphere came out of its epicenter.

Sam woke up feeling something odd on his forehead, when he noticed a small and faint beam of white light coming out of it, which then went through the ceiling.

Puzzled, he narrowed his eyes.

Outside, the sphere was hit by the beam and begun descending toward Lennart’s manor entering Sam’s stone house.

If anyone saw this, they would have become fanatical and Sam would have been executed on the spot.

With the village's history, this phenomenon would have been without a doubt related to the cursed son of the Lennart’s family.

Sam seeing the sphere, was startled. A sphere the size of a basketball hovered above his bed. The outside was translucent black, and inside, rainbow light were flickering.

Above all, the eerie atmosphere that emanated from it remembered him of the event that happened in RESERV that day.

“What is the meaning of this...” Sam was at his wits end. The sphere emitted a faint, buzzing sound. It was as if an extremely high tension was raging inside it.

Suddenly, that sphere started spinning, and as it spun, it shrunk to the size of a marble.

A huge shockwave shacked Sam’s house.

In the village, some people woke up. Wondering on what had happened. The sky was clear, ruling out lightning. However, the event of a swarm of beast rushing toward the village was a possibility.

Villagers were frightened.

“What is happening?”

“Is it an earthquake?”

“Maybe it’s a spirit beast”

The woken up people continued surveying for a while. When they saw that nothing noteworthy was happening, they dispatched some people around the village to stand guard and the rest went back to sleep.

Inside the room, the marble was still hovering above Sam, spinning. Sam was looking at it fixedly, wary of what would happen. If this marble decided to attack him, he could not do a thing.

The Marble hovered ten centimeters from Sam passing above his head, chest, and stopped in the region of his navel. It hovered closer and Sam could feel the pressure the marble was emitting. The pressure was so strong, that he was sure upon contact, it would pierce through him like a hot knife through butter. The marble went up a meter, stopped spinning, then descended toward Sam, came in contact and disappeared.

Sam at first was greeting his teeth in preparation for the pain. However, when the marble disappeared, he had an uneasy feeling in his lower abdomen.

In his body, the marble started spinning faster and faster emitting a buzzy sound. Suddenly, it relinquished tendrils made of white energy, which coursed through his spinal canal.

The tendrils entered his brain through the spinal cord, and transformed into countless energy rays of different colors, which circled through and merged with Sam’s brain and cortex tissues.

Sam felt a piercing pain in his lower abdomen, and then the pain travelled along his spine going up until it reached his head. Then it exploded. The pain was mind breaking.

Sam was rolling his eyes, shouting, but with the voice he had, unfortunately, it was more like a whisper and no one heard him. Saliva and blood was dripping profusely from his mouth; blood was coming out of his ears, his eyes, and his nose. He looked as if possessed by a demon, his eyes rolled white.

He wanted to hold his head, but considering his physical condition, it was in vain, adding despair to his pain.

He raged for a time, muffled howls of pain escaping from his juvenile mouth, and then he fainted. Sam only woke up the next day in the evening.

After relinquishing the tendrils for a time, the marble stopped its emission.

Inside Sam's brain, countless tissues were activating. Creating new brain connections at an unbelievable pace. Billions of unused cells activated, or regenerated, and immediately afterward linked in the network. White energy was released which strengthened further the organization, optimizing it. The network lines merged at the base of the brain and connected to the marble through the spinal canal.

In Sam's lower abdomen, the marble was still spinning.

-------

Morning the next day,

After breakfast, Brian came to Sam’s house with his family. Yesterday his children looked interested in Gerad’s son condition, so today everyone came along.

It has been a little more than a week since it woke up, so Brian called over Dr. Mepan for a check.

Today, they were no visitors allowed for the ‘cursed child’ as villager called it.

He wanted his family to have a good and undisturbed look to this attraction.

Brian was convinced that Gerad’s son would remain unconscious, however, for the sake of face; he nonetheless mended a refiner to look after it. Even the RuneQI talismans Carla used all these years were cheap talismans made by this third rate refiner.

Denise looked at Sam frightfully and said. “How can it be alive?”.

Its body was tattered by years of RuneQI infusion, its left arm was crooked and its right leg seems shorter. However, she knew how it looked already, what truly frightened Denise was the traces of dried blood all over its dirty face. Blood seemed to have seeped from all his orifices. It was a hellish scene.

Celine, who was also surprised, walked out after a while. She was unable to bear with the scent anymore.

Sasha on the other hand was excited. He did not mind the scent, he smelled far worse at White Snow SECT. No, what he thought was amusing is the fact that he came the day it died. He was laughing inside.

However, Brian was confused. In all the years Carla looked after it, he never heard her speak about this phenomenon. He sent for Carla and soon afterward, Carla came with Mepan who had just arrived.

Carla and Mepan looked after Sam’s body and wore the same expression his family members had few moments ago.

Seeing that, Brian asked: “Carla, you have been taking care of Gerad’s son for fourteen years. Have this ever happened before?”

Carla, who was in a daze looking at Sam’s body, woke up and said hurriedly: “N-Never my Lord. In all the years I took care of it, I never saw this. It has always been sleeping.” She no longer cared to call it ‘Gerad’s son’ in front of Brian.

Brian frowned and turned his attention toward Mepan who was currently examining Sam’s body.

Mepan sorted out his talisman and taking out a crystal from his bag, put it on Sam’s forehead.

The crystal flashed and information appeared inside. Reading it, he muttered: “it seems his internal organs are fine, moreover, his system seems to have recovered completely. My talismans did have quite the effect after all”.

Turning toward Brian he said: ”It seems Lord Brian’s helper has dutifully applied the prescription, but his system seems to have over-reacted due to the damage done on his veins over the years. However, his condition is not bad. He should be able to recover to a certain extent.”

He then looked at Carla. “Carla, you have to apply these muscles strengthening talismans during the next few days. As soon as he is able to carry himself, you can stop treating him. I recon no more than three days will be necessary. I’ll apply the first set to show you how it’s done.”

Everyone was shocked. Three days. Mepan just said that in three days, ‘’it’ will be able to move.

Will they be able to treat it as a person?

All these years it has been sleeping, if it was not for Brian being afraid of Gerad’s wrath. He woud not have taken care of it. Brian would never have allowed it to live for so long, eating away his money without giving anything in return!

Brian was wearing a complex expression, he could not kill it, and the prospect of having a fourteen years old baby made him uneasy. If it was awake all these years, it could have gained some knowledge of the world and basic behavior patterns, but what would happen after waking up of fourteen years of nothingness was unpredictable..

Sasha and Denise on the other hand were happy to have come visit their parents; they looked at Sam’s body with the eyes of kids who just found an abandoned toy.

------

When he woke up, Sam was still feeling numbness in his head. Recalling what happened the day before, he shivered. That pain was otherworldly. It was as if bugs had been eating away his head and mind.

Calming down, he began to ponder. Observing himself, his expression changed.

"How is that possible..."

He seemed to have somewhat learned a great deal about sciences and engineering, but that was not all.

Anatomy, acoustics, medicine, physiology, mineralogy, energy, electronic... all kinds of knowledge he did not know about before appeared in his consciousness.

If, for example, someone was to ask him to conduct a homeopathic analysis, give medical diagnose or identify a precise type of plant, minerals or even bones, he was sure, that this miraculously acquired knowledge would allow him to do it.

How was that possible?

Sam had never been the intellectual type, at all.

Since youth, few months after the disastrous explosion at CERN, his father, a captain in the foreign legion, understood that society was in the brink of collapse, breach of security and collective hysteria was inevitable.

He thus showed him how to survive in a world where the law of the jungle was about to break out.

Being able to defend oneself was the very basis to survive. Sam was gifted for this type of teaching.

He spent twelve years training in weapons, tactics, strategy and military organization. He also trained and was considered a genius in the army martial arts regiment. He planned and accomplished missions in squad for a time, and ended up working for the firm his father created after the terrible collapse of Cern’s hadron collider.

However, Sam never studied technology or sciences.

Of course, he had basis in computer security, but that was just the necessary knowledge to accomplish his missions. Nothing more. He was a soldier, not a scientist or a teacher!

Then how did he learn so much? The only conclusion Sam could come up with was this marble. It must have done something to him.

But that made no sense.

This dream, although completely ridiculous was beginning to feel too real.

Before, he was able to relate the sensations that happened during his dream to stimulus of the nursing treatment on his real body.

However, now…

He though, “I’ll just focus on resting for now. And as soon as I can, I’ll escape from this hellhole.”

He decided that what happened here was just too confusing. He did not have the informations needed to have a clear understanding of his situation. He was sure, however, that he had to get out of here.

The only positive point in all that is the fact that his body was slightly better than yesterday.